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Report Says 36.4% of World's Computers Infringe on IP
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a new report by Digital Music News, 36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed. Given their claim that filling an iPod legally would cost about $40,000, they're pretty sure that most of those computers are infringing upon at least a few imaginary property rights. BitTorrent shouldn't feel left out, though. BitTorrent actually uses more bandwidth, but the article suggests that this is because it is used to share larger files, like movies."
"36.4% of the world's computers have LimeWire installed"
That's some damned weak logic, since LimeWire's real reason for existance (and the RIAA's opposition to it) is for independant artists to get their music out.
The RIAA labels have radio and empty-v. Since the RIAA effectively killed "internet radio" P2P is all the indies have.
Now someone please tell me, I heard a song by some indie whose name I don't remember named "scatterbrain". There are literally hundreds of different songs with that name. How can I get a copy of the lagal song I want without ACCIDENTALLY downloading some crap RIAA song with the same name?*
The war against P2P is a war against their competetitors, the independant musicians.
-mcgrew
* Fuck LimeWire, Morpheus has a check box where you don't automatically share downloaded files. The RIAA can go fuck themselves. Hey guess what they are!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
From the report linked to in the article, the data was collected when users went to a site (pcpitstop.com) and allowed their computers to be scanned so that the software could find "performance improvements" and make suggestions for their machine. Although I'm sure it was buried in the fine print of the TOS, I wonder how many people realized they were allowing this type of information to be sold to data mining and/or marketing companies.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
When I was an undergrad I was downloading some Linux ISO (required for work) and meanwhile playing a game of DotA, a Warcraft 3 mod.
WC3 maintains a direct connection to all the other players in the game -- it uses a P2P network model rather than client-server -- but uses a trivial amount of bandwidth (under 10 KB/sec).
The network admins saw someone with connections open to residential ISP IP addresses and using a lot of bandwidth (ignoring the connection to ftp.mandrake.com or whatever) and call me to tell me that they're killing all my open connections due to P2P download abuse.
WTF?
That's the upside. The down side is that everything gets pushed through every link which means more than 3TB/day. A modern design would be a cached pull system. Say you request part afba76a7b687af6b87fa6b87a6fbaf67 (hash sum), it goes to the local central, which checks local store (basicly a LRU disk cache), if not requests it from regional central, who'll again request it from the national central, who'll keep requesting it up the chain. If none of the caching servers can help, ultimately you connect to the torrent and get it from one of the seeds. Your ISP can cache it on the way out too, so you seed once and the backbone doesn't need to pull it from your seed line more than once. If the cache expires, it can be reseeded again as long as there's peers like with regular torrents. Basicly, no wasteful transfer because there's no traversal without enduser, it only passes once over a link, no expirery as long as someone is seeding. Technically, this is not really difficult it's legally the problem is. With many switching to encrypted torrents this kind of acceleration just isn't possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The ISPs could save massive amounts of money on content distribution if only they could cache it all closer to the enduser. They cannot do this now because the distribution is illegal. DRM was supposed to solve this problem by making it so that anybody could download anything but only those with the correct permissions could use the content. DRM however is flawed in that it just cannot work, smart people who want the content will always prevail. Attack is vastly simpler than defense (a good offense is always better than a good defense).
The solution is to have the sales of music go through a third party distributor (iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, whatever) and have the ISP distribute the actual content. The key here is that the ISPs would have to allow any third party to sell their content through the distribution network to maintain their status as common carriers. Record labels get paid, independent artists and small record labels have the same access to a massively scalable distribution network as the big guys and best of all the load on the network goes down substantially.
You're applying the adjective "imaginary" to the wrong noun. Indeed, you're applying it to a noun that isn't even there. You may not have noticed, but not once have I referred to "imaginary property law" (which would contain the ambiguity you describe).
It is the "property" that is only imaginary, because it is a non-rivalrous good with a very low marginal cost. In other words, we can both have a copy without deleting the other person's and it's cheap to make more copies. The law tries to make it rivalrous by giving the author legal rights to prevent duplication and certain other things, but it can't do much of anything about the low marginal cost, so a black market flourishes. Yes, they've tried things like blank CD levies, but those don't seem to do much.
As for the propaganda comment, I'd say that you must be new here, but come on. Believe it or not, I do not represent any government or business, just myself. To call it "propaganda" because you think I'm sensationalizing a report that's going to get passed off to those in power as saying exactly what I said it implies is a bit much. I know the report is badly flawed. That's actually part of why it's newsworthy.
Finally, you should have realized something already, but I can't count on that if you think that adjectives like "imaginary" modify nouns like "law" that aren't there, so I'll tell you outright: I know all this because I am the submitter and I was the first I know of to coin the term "imaginary property." Don't worry, though. You can use that term freely, as much as you want.
You're welcome.